A group of twenty-eight [healthy young] individuals ingested two grams of choline bitartrate or a placebo in two separate sessions. Seventy minutes post ingestion, participants performed a visuomotor aiming task in which they had to rapidly hit the centers of targets. Results showed that participants hit targets more centrally after choline supplementation. Pupil size (a cognition-sensitive biomarker) also significantly decreased after choline intake and correlated positively with the hit distance to the targets and the number of target misses, and negatively with reaction times. These findings point to a choline-induced bias towards action precision in the trade-off between speed and accuracy. The changes in pupil size suggest that choline uptake alters cholinergic functions in the nervous system...
We found that choline bitartrate administration improves visomotor performance and decreases pupil size of healthy humans. This is the first scientific evidence for a rapid change in the nervous system and behavior after choline ingestion, pointing at choline’s wide-ranging effects on cognition...
A particularly interesting observation from the present study was that individuals that were more effective (i.e., produced fewer misses) benefitted more from choline supplementation than less effective individuals. While this outcome pattern seems counterintuitive as one would expect more room for improvement in the less efficient individuals, we have observed similar patterns in other cognitive-enhancement interventions (e.g.,53). One possible explanation for such patterns might be that, at least in the cases being tested so far, the pre-interventional performance did not only reflect the current skill level but also the individual degree of short-term plasticity of the skill.
